Museum gets grant for next rehab phase

The Port Huron Museum will get big help for the next phase renovations at its Carnegie Center.

The Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs is giving the museum a $37,500 grant for the improvements. Museum Director Susan Bennett said the money will help install two handicapped accessible bathrooms on the building’s main floor and replace the black metal stanchions in the former library stacks that support its glass mezzanine.

The museum would be required to match the grant. The project is expected to cost about $100,000. The rest will be raised from local donors to the museum’s Carnegie Reimagined campaign.

“We just want to take down as many of those stanchions as we can because they’re 30 inches on center and it’s always been a maze through there,” Bennett said. “Not only do they hold up the glass floor of the mezzanine, they also were the stacks. Those were bookshelves back when it was a library.”

That included refurbishing the front two galleries and its rotunda to reflect how it looked when it opened in 1904.

The museum's current restrooms are in the basement. The new bathrooms will go behind the stanchions under the mezzanine.

The museum has to have construction done by October 2018 according to terms of the grant. Bennett said the museum will kick off a new fundraising effort Oct. 1 and hopes to start construction in January.

The project will require a temporary closure of the museum. Details are still being worked out, but Bennett said the closure will be "nowhere near as long as last time," when the museum was closed most a year.

Bennett said she had hoped to include an update to the museum’s kitchen as part of the next phase.

As part of upgrading the facility to be a favorable event venue, she said she hoped to make the kitchen a good staging area for caterers. However, she said it depends on how much the museum is able to raise from donors.

Council for the Arts grants were awarded to 474 recipients from 56 counties; 575 applicants had sought a share of the pie. The grants total $10.6 million.

“We were pleased that we scored very highly,” Bennett said. “This grant hasn’t been available every year. This was the first capital improvement grant offered in a couple years. So we were very lucky to be in that spot.”

Elsewhere in the Blue Water Area, the Lexington Arts Council will receive $6,750; it had requested $15,000. Applications from the International Symphony Orchestra and Studio 1219 were unsuccessful.

Contact Jackie Smith at (810) 989-6270 or jssmith@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @Jackie20Smith.

TO FIND OUT MORE

You can give to the “Carnegie Reimagined” campaign, or inquire about events and venue options by calling (810) 982-0891 or visiting www.phmuseum.org.